*

We have not seen each other two and a half weeks. When she asked how I have been, lost for something to say, I told her about Salwa, what a huge impact her book had had on me: the emotional turbulence I feel when I read her; the long pensive silences into which I fall when I do not. I spoke the truth: everything else which has happened in the last two and a half weeks has been by comparison -- irrelevant, immaterial.

She asked me why and only then I realized that I cannot explain it to her; and that therefore I should not have mentioned it in the first place.